© 2004 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

s it possible for two people to vote Republican and still be crunchy granola hippie freaks?  That’s what people are calling me and Lauren seven months into this pregnancy.  They keep expecting us to trade in our khakis for tie-dyed shirts, pick up a bong and a start singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.”  It started in the first trimester when we told everybody that we were taking the concept of “natural childbirth” to the next, we thought, logical step: homebirth.  That way, Lauren could walk around naked, sit in the tub and deliver bent over the toilet if she felt like it – with all her loved ones looking on. 

Well that gave the peanut gallery a nice healthy head start.  “Isn’t that dangerous?  What if something goes wrong?  You mean you can’t have pain medication?”  That last one was a sticking point for a lot of women and we’ve been treated to countless anecdotes of their excruciating labors.  “It felt like somebody was twisting my intestines with a fork…  I wanted to French kiss the anesthesiologist… Oh honey, everybody starts out intending to go drug free.”  Lauren, a midwife herself, tries to explain how lying on your back in a hospital bed actually makes the pain worse, but they just smirk with their “oh-you’ll-see” faces.

Men seem to focus more on the safety issue, baffled by how Lauren is going to accomplish this impossible task without the aid of modern technology.  Apparently they view birth as a tricky medical procedure rather than a natural process that women did for thousands of years before the invention of the ultrasound, the fetal heart monitor and the machine that goes BING.  Lauren can rattle off the safety statistics of midwives and homebirths until she’s blue in the face, but all that does is deprive our child of oxygen.  Better to save her breath.  There’s plenty more defending to be done.

Like Lauren’s plan to breastfeed.  You’d be surprised at how many women think this is a weird and unnatural concept: “There’s going to be a baby… sucking on it.”  There’s the country-wide road trip we’re planning for next month: “How is she going to sit still for that long?”  And the fact that we’re planning on letting the baby sleep with us for the first few months while Lauren is breastfeeding: “You’ll turn that kid into a clingy little sissy.”   If only they’d just call us hippie freaks and be on their merry way.  Instead, we’ve just stopped sharing our ideas with people in order to save ourselves dozens of annoying conversations that answer the same questions over and over again.

For a couple of months, Lauren and I have been considering drying her placenta, putting the powder into capsules and taking them as homeopathic supplements.  But anybody who gets weirded out by breastfeeding would have an aneurysm if we even mentioned the word placenta.  We’d probably get cut out of a couple wills in the process.  “Your grandfather did not storm the beach at Normandy so you could grow up and start eating placentas.”  So we’ve held off on telling anybody until… well, now I guess.  Sorry guys.  Here, take a bong hit. 

I know that every sarcastic remark is meant purely out of love and concern for our well-being.  And I know that everyone’s shock and disbelief stems from the fact that Lauren and I are poster children for conservative, middle-class, American WASP’s.  Maybe if Lauren had dread-locks and hairy armpits, they wouldn’t think twice about her delivering in the living room.  If she didn’t wear a bra, they’d find it only natural that she’s planning to breastfeed.  If we owned a VW van instead of a Mazda Protege, I’d get a lot less grief about dragging my wife all over the country when she’s seven months pregnant.  I’m sure we’d still lose our inheritance over the whole placenta thing, but at least we’d have more energy – and air supply – to plead our case with a stirring chorus of “Kumbaya.”

We love our family and friends dearly and know that when the time comes they’ll be incredibly supportive and just make fun of us behind our backs.  Until then, we’ve got one more trimester of stress-inducing self-defense ahead of us.  It’d probably be easier to remain calm if either of us did yoga, but please, that is just so crunchy.